Watercolor study

(C) 2016 Dale DiMauro

Last month on vacation in Maine I came upon this young woman against this backdrop of a wetland. I imagined the color of her white t-shirt against a clump of dark blue spruces, which one experiences along the Maine coast, as stunning, when done in watercolor. Part of it is the upright posture of the girl reflected in the vertical mass of the evergreens.

In the world we live in today, I constantly see people with a cell phone, water bottle or a dog all at close proximity. I want to portray these elements in some of my paintings in a natural unposed state. This is a challenge, as you can imagine. I hike in the nearby woods and fields where I live and come upon people walking their dog while talking on their cellphone with no one around nearly every day.

I did try mixing different greens to capture the evergreens and develop a greater sense of depth in the picture. For the evergreens, I mixed Winsor blue (red shade) with new gamboge yellow, which was a new combination for me. The other green in the foreground, is a variation of aureolin with Prussian blue. At this point in my practice I do not use any green straight out of the tube, unmixed. However, if I need to set a color back, distance-wise or in temperature, in a picture, I apply a wash of ultramarine blue or Paynes' gray.